The potential dangers of techno-science

I can think of a way that techno-science has shaped, if but for some time, a past roommate of mine. When I first met her, I noticed she had some mild tendencies of OCD. For example, she would take hours to complete her morning and evening routine, which simply included getting ready; she nitpicked at her skin a lot and was obsessed with any insubstantial and, frankly, unnoticeable “imperfections” she had. This was the extent to which I first noticed she had such tendencies. However, after going to the doctor once, she came back and said that she had been diagnosed with OCD. Things became a little wild after this—this diagnosis produced a sense of legitimation for her disorder. She started nitpicking not just at her skin but also at every minute detail. Things had to be spotless in the kitchen; any little strand of hair that fell on the kitchen floor became an egregious offense, and the vacuum could almost daily be heard in her room. When Carl Elliot spoke of the concept of “semantic contagion,” I immediately thought of my roommate and how, in light of this event in which her doctor concretized or reified her OCD, she became even more OCD, allowing it to spread into her other forms of behavior, as described. I reflect back on this now and am reminded of the potential dangers of science. It makes me think of how it can distort and obscure our actual perceptions of what is true and real. I saw this “instrument”—her doctor listening and observing my roommate as well as prescribing her with this condition—in a way as counterproductive to her betterment; even though she had been given, I believe, SSRI’s to combat her OCD, it only seemed as though she became worse because she had re-conceptualized her own self and her own predilections for cleanliness and “perfection” upon learning about her diagnosis and doing follow-up research on what it means to have OCD. She would have been better off developing more self-awareness and self-esteem on her own rather than plunging into (in this case) the abyss of techno-science and believing in the authority and instruments of her doctor to figure out exactly “what’s wrong” with her.